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Garance Franke-Ruta

Garance Franke-Ruta is a former senior editor at the Prospect. Her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Washington Monthly, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications. She was a 2006 recipient of a fellowship at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy at Harvard University.

Recent Articles

LifeNews.com -- the A.P. of the pro-life movement -- is reporting that the head of a major crisis pregnancy center advocacy group is trying to mitigate the weight of the National Right to Life Committee's endorsement of Fred Thompson by coming out in favor of Mike Huckabee : One day after National Right to Life endorsed former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, the leader of a national pregnancy center organization says he's backing Mike Huckabee. Tom Glessner, an attorney and the head of the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, says he supports the former Arkansas governor. NIFLA, a pro-life law firm which provides legal and other services for over 1,100 pregnancy centers across the country, isn't backing a candidate, but Glessner is doing so personally. Glessner issued his endorsement in a letter to the more than 2,500 pregnancy centers nationwide and told LifeNews.com about his decision. "Forty-nine million abortions since 1973 is a moral blight upon our land that must be...

This may paint me as a bit of a geek to say, but I thought the most interesting part of Ryan Lizza 's latest New Yorker opus on Barack Obama , the candidate that Lizza did more than any other writer to push into the 2008 race, was on the Obama campaign's use of microtargeting data: If Hillary Clinton wins in Iowa, she will be harder to stop in later contests....While Waliser was teaching the intricacies of caucus-night mechanics, a thousand miles away, in Washington, D.C., an array of forty-eight computer processors were mining census demographics, consumer-marketing data, and Iowa-state voter files to form one of the most sophisticated and data-rich portraits of an electorate ever created. This is the work of Ken Strasma, who is among the Democratic Party’s most admired numbers gurus. After being pursued by all the major candidates, Strasma, who helped Kerry to win Iowa in 2004, decided to commit his firm, Strategic Telemetry, to Obama. In the nineteen-nineties, consultants loved to...

Someone must have declared Wednesday web video day: Hillary says "caucusing is easy" ; an Israeli humor site animates the race ; and a little boy in Kenya is inspired by the name Obama to dream about a bigger future . That last one in particular is worth a watch, because it shows just how much power American ideas and actions -- such as the ideals of justice popularized by the civil and women's rights movements -- can have around the world. Mike Huckabee 's shoe-string campaign is soliciting $1 donations -- "a buck for Huck!" -- i.e. e-mail addresses for list-building purposes. A solicitation letter to supporters points out that he's broken the 20 percent barrier in Iowa despite having "spent $0 on television advertising." And Zephyr Teachout issues a challenge to political reporters. --Garance Franke-Ruta

Does anyone else remember back when Eliot Spitzer could do no wrong and was being hailed as the most likely candidate for first Jewish president? It seems like a very long time ago. CNN is reporting that Spitzer, who was in DC meeting with the New York delegation, will announce plans to withdraw his controversial driver's licenses for illegal immigrants proposal today. The RNC already sent out a press release, crowing: "Hillary Left Holding The Bag." --Garance Franke-Ruta

Special all Clinton round: Former Bush-Cheney '04 webmaster and RNC e-Campaign Director Patrick Ruffini starts a Facebook group "Official Petition Against Hillary Clinton "They Look Like Facebook" Insult," responding to Mark Penn 's assertion that Barack Obama 's supporters "look like Facebook." Mike Turk , former e-Campaign Director for Bush-Cheney '04 and a friend of Ruffini's, posts the link; they get 389 supporters in less than 24 hours. Still unanswered question: Is this all in good fun or are the dynamic duo working for a new G.O.P. client? Ruffini also pens an interesting take on how Bill Clinton 's presidency might have gone had there been blogs back in the day, asserting that the new media world would have hurt him because it rewards "the politician who is clear, direct, and succinct, whose words make sense in 12-point Times New Roman." The other Clinton, the Senator, is holding on to her Iowa and New Hampshire leads , reports Time 's "The Page." Meanwhile, via Crowley , her...